The present disclosure relates to an ink jet printing device and method for transferring and fusing an image layer from an image receptor to a recording medium, such as paper, and more specifically to forming an ultraviolet radiation-curable image on an image receptor and transfusing the formed image from the image receptor to a recording medium.
Imaging processes may be used to develop black and white, single color, or multi-color images. Multi-color imaging may be done either as a fully-formed image or a step-formed image. A fully-formed image implies that an image with multiple colors is fully formed on the image receptor and then transferred to the recording medium in a single step. In a step-formed image, the colored images are individually formed on the image recorder and transferred to the recording medium one color at a time.
A method of transferring an image from an image receptor to a recording medium, U.S. Pat. No. 5,212,526, comprises electrostatically depositing toner to form a toned image layer on a surface of an image receptor, the toned image layer including a toner material and a radiation-curable material. Toners are typically amorphous or semicrystalline materials having broad melting temperature ranges. A recording medium is contacted with the toned image layer, and the toned image layer is irradiated in contact with the recording medium to cure the radiation-curable material. The resulting cured material is disclosed to have greater adhesion to the toner material and the recording medium than to the surface of the image receptor. In this method, the image receptor is made of a dielectric material to facilitate the uniform electrostatic charge of conventional xerography or ionography.